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Saturday, 12 April 2014

Traveller

A weekend update...

My week (or so) has involved such things as workshopping poetry (seriously, it's amazing how fired up and excited a group of literary-enthusiasts can become over the implications for meaning of 'the' or 'a' within a particular clause. Arguments and dark-choc-ginger biscuits galore. I seriously love this new group I'm part of!), eating dinner at the delicious 'restaurant, cafe and boating venue', 'The Folly', which I recommend for anyone visiting Oxford, walkies with Lulu, of course, and the usual other exploits... I also had a really nice wander around the Wiltshire village Lacock during a lunch break, when modelling there for a portraiture workshop. I was on the hunt for the small village bakery and came back with a new watch. Typical. (I'm still on the hunt for one to replace the beautiful watch I was given for my 21st birthday but unfortunately lost; this new one is no replacement, really, but a fun (/cheap) stand in. It's magnetic. Handmade. It has silver hearts. It's nicer than it sounds.) I also had a last minute agency job which involved a loooooong costume-fitting for an exciting production I'm going to be involved in, which I'm sure I'll tell you all about in due course.

For the image side of things, here's something by Phil Chaplin (more of his beautiful work here). How cool was this, for a location?! A step up (quite literally) from the usual 'model on train tracks' cliche you see done again and again... Thank you Phil for letting me blog this, in both mono and colour...

(Click to see properly.)

P.S. I'm so in love with Ray Lamontagne (Till the Sun Turns Black is such a beautiful album, e.g. this exquisite auditory business), and love this new, uncharacteristically upbeat summer offering. I know you don't ask for my current musical interests, but I feel compelled to share them with you, occasionally. :-)

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Visitors since 13th July 2010

Bouguereau, 'Evening Mood'

Velasquez - The Rokeby Venus

J. W. Waterhouse, 'The Lady of Shalott'

Rossetti, 'Venus Verticordia'

John Grimshaw, 'Iris'

J. W. Waterhouse, 'My Sweet Rose'

Guerin, 'L'aurore et Cephale'

Botticelli, 'The Birth of Venus'

J. W. Waterhouse, 'Psyche Opening the Golden Box'

Pamela Hanson, 'Bis'

Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Natasha Khan/Bat for Lashes, 'Horse and I'

Got woken in the night,by a mystic golden light.My head soaked in river water.I had been dressed in a coat of armor. They calleda horse out of the woodland."Take her there, through the desert shores."They sang to me, "This is yours to wear.You're the chosen one, there's no turning back now."

The smell of redwood giants.The banquet for the shadows.Horse and I, we're dancers in the dark.Came upon the headdress.It was gilded, dark and golden.The children sang.I was so afraid I took it to my head and prayed.They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."

Mark Doty, 'A Display of Mackerel'

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other

—nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even now

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

Kate Clanchy, 'Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell'

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my handsmells like the feel of an old school desk,the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scentmy armpits sound a bass note strongas the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharpas the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the napeof my neck, just where you might bendyour head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleetof tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.